Updating firmware of mobile devices can be performed wirelessly over the air. The Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) has developed techniques for device management (DM) including techniques for updating firmware. A typical firmware update may require dozens, hundreds, thousands of files, or more.
Some solutions wrap all necessary update files into a single file to be downloaded by a particular mobile device. However, the various firmware/hardware permutations of a group of deployed mobile devices can be of high number and of highly variability. This can result in unique update files being required for each unique permutation. Such update files are known to be generated ahead of time or generated on the fly, as needed. Both of these methods can be inefficient, wasteful, and costly, particularly if only a subset of the permutations is actually in use. Generating a large number of unique update files ahead of time can consume a large amount of storage space. Generating unique update files on the fly can result in network bottlenecks when mobile device updates are performed over a short period of time (e.g., during a morning commute) as computing power and network resources to handle such network traffic peaks may not be available.
Thus, known techniques for updating mobile device firmware suffer from a number of disadvantages, including inefficient use of storage space, high network demands, and costly implementation.